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Friday, February 15, 2013

alien/not?

NOTICE: Femcriticon is in about a month! Time to begin planning! class buddies help each other come up with ideas and edit each other's work; and you can pick a partner for collaboration if you like too! LOTTERY TODAY! WILL YOU DO A POSTER OR A PAPER FOR THIS FIRST CON? IT WILL BE DECIDED BY LOTTERY TODAY!

The theme is "Media Ecologies." Our class' expertise is in "Design Fiction." Explore what these mean as you consider what to do.
=Johnson is your best resource for our approach to media ecologies, so be sure you are caught up with having read the whole book. Merrick is also all about media ecologies with a feminist SF focus.
=When you think of design fiction, think of all the ways we have been approaching and thinking and talking about our readings, and the interactions among the extraterrestrial relativities of multiple ways of exploring "sf." Look at the website carefully, as well as Helmreich's essay. Both are your best resource for understanding the multiple realities of designing fictions. Fictions = makings.
=How does the NearFuture Laboratory share thinking? How would you do this same kind of analysis yourself? (Some clues are in the Media tab of the website too.)

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The essays for this week are longer and quite challenging: try reading them like poetry. Or like software documentation.... In a back and forth bits of reading, wondering, connecting with this week's stories, and with everything we have read and talked about up to now....

Katie’s office hours:Katie is often available for talk and concerns right after each class; her regular office hours are on Wednesdays at either 2:30-4 pm or at 4-6 pm. The SignIn Sheet tells you which it is this week. There is a calendar outside Katie's door that says so too. And you can see which it is on Katie's website, under NEWS! On the last Wednesday of the month Katie tries to have extended office hours from 2:30 to 5:30.

Katie’s social hours:these are on Wednesdays at either 2:30-4 pm, or at 4-6 pm, alternately with office hours. These too are noted on the calendar outside Katie's door as well as on Katie's website, under NEWS! On the last Tuesday of the month Katie shifts social hours to that day, from 5-7 pm. What are social hours? a time to drop by to talk to Katie and whoever else shows up, other students, both undergrad and grad, occasionally faculty and staff, or even folks in the area.

Conversations with Irene: these are also on Wednesdays, from 11-12. Irene Xue (email: ixue@terpmail.umd.edu ) is the teaching assistant for our class, who is offering her own drop in times for students to talk about feminisms, science fiction, second life, or anything else that comes up in class that you hope to learn more about, or just share more about. FLYER

Design Fiction

“How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called ‘design fiction’ that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.... Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. ...It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination.” (Bleecker 2009)

About Me

I am Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). My Ph.D. is from the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with interdisciplinary scholarship located at a juncture of feminist technoscience studies, intersectional digital cultures and media studies, and LGBT Studies. I have published two books, Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. women's movements (Indiana, 1994) and Networked Reenactments: Stories transdisciplinary knowledges tell (Duke, 2011) and am now working on
Attaching, for Climate Change: a sympoiesis of media, and Demonstrations and Experiments: Quaker women at the origins of modern Science.